It’s hard to tell which squeaks loudest in Woody Allen’s 60s-set series Crisis in Six Scenes (Amazon Studios): the creaking jokes, the creaking joints of most of the cast, or the creaking Tinkertoy plot construction, equipped with its own built-in cop-out device. What enticed the snow-capped Woodster into doing a limited series for Amazon after a long domino row of distinctive feature films? (Cafe Society being the latest, with a new one currently lensing in New York, as Variety might say.) Interviewed by Deadline’s Mike Fleming Jr. in May 2015, Allen admitted that TV was a blank screen to him, apart from basketball games and the nightly Nembutal of Charlie Rose. He never watched Mad Men, The Sopranos, or any other highly renowned cable heavyweight, had no idea what streaming video was, and was wary of straying from his movie-making comfort zone. But the money being offered, like a belly dancer’s undulating hips, became too rich and hypnotic to resist. Refusing to take no for an answer, Amazon, that ambitious hussy out to top Netflix, kept wagging bigger and bigger sums before Allen’s eyes, assuring the writer-director-star that he could do anything he wanted; moreover, “everybody around me was pressuring me [to] do it.” And so, caught in a heady swirl of tassels and dollar signs, he overrode his qualms and signed his pact with Satan. “And I have regretted every second since I said O.K.,” he rued to Deadline. In Crisis in Six Scenes (a misnomer—the crisis unfolds in six episodes, not scenes), he passes on his rue to you, the home consumer.

After a rousing opening credits newsreel montage of Sixties anti-war protests, scary Black Panthers, and campus uprisings set to the anthem of Jefferson Airplane’s “Volunteers” (even after all this time the voices of Marty Balin and Grace Slick will not be denied), the camera finds our hapless hero (Allen) plopped in a barber’s chair, improbably requesting that his white hair be trimmed and styled to make him look like more like James Dean, a Mission: Impossible even for Vidal Sassoon. Woody calls himself Sidney in this outing, a former ad writer and semi-successful novelist who pompously bills himself as S. J. Munsinger, a split homage to the humorist S. J. Perelman (a personal favorite of Allen’s) and the famously reclusive J. D. Salinger, whose holy name hovers like white smoke. As the barber goes about his make-believe business (his scissors seem to be snipping air), Sidney says he’s working on an idea for a TV series. “It’s very lucrative,” he says, compared to writing novels, and it’s clear that, for Sidney, the Novel is his true calling, just as the Movie is Woody’s. TV is a lesser vocation, just a way of sweetening the pot, staying busy. Unfortunately, the series lives up, or down, to this implicit disclaimer.

It needn’t have. The premise isn’t inherently un-seaworthy. A schnook in the now threadbare tradition of self-deprecating, hypochondriacal Jewish humor, Sidney lives in a roomy suburban dream house with his wife, Kay (Elaine May), a marriage counselor who practices out of her home office. Along with this irregular influx of couples, Munsinger Manse plays host to Kay’s book club of older women, a weekly parade of handbags and hairdos who suggest a matinee audience for the latest Neil Simon play and who discuss Kafka as if they hadn’t had a lick of college or sense. Sid and Kay have settled into the comfortable dotage of bourgeois desiccation, a daily rosary of minor complaints and banal observations. Invading their cocooned enclave one moody night is a radical militant on the lam, Darlene a.k.a. “Lennie” (Miley Cyrus), a member of a Weather Underground-like group called the Constitutional Liberation Army. Busted out of jail (a guard was shot), she needs a hideout until she can make her escape to Cuba, that socialist paradise beneath the beckoning palms. Why she chose this house as her hideout is explained in a gob of exposition that requires a suspension of disbelief on the viewer’s part bordering on levitation. And although Lennie claims to be starving and desperate as she raids the contents of the refrigerator like a bear, there’s never been a healthier-looking fugitive freed from captivity, her white teeth beautifully clean, her skin aglow, her golden hair a tribute to the glory of shampoo. Take away the standard-issue green fatigue jacket and she belongs more to Archie comics than to a back issue of Ramparts.

But of course realism and verisimilitude aren’t the priorities here. Lennie’s role is as a catalyst, a rude awakener whose cartoon militancy casts a wow spell over a tribe of cartoon mush-head liberals, with only cranky Sidney resisting her siren call to arms, not because of his own political convictions (he has none) but because he hates having his fussbudget domestic routine disturbed by a moocher helping herself to all of his navel oranges and Fig Newtons. If she wants to off the pigs, fine, but lay off his snacks. But by not turning her into the police when they have the chance, he and Kay are culpable for harboring a fugitive, and the longer she remains under roof, the deeper the doddering duo become drawn into her get-away scheme, criminally complicit. For Kay, it’s a bit of a kick, an escape from the everyday humdrum (“You shouldn’t be thinking radical politics, you should be thinking hip replacement!” Sidney fumes). Thus making Crisis in Six Scenes a hybrid update of 1971’s Bananas, where Allen’s nebbishy bystander found himself sucked into revolutionary turmoil, and 1993’s Manhattan Murder Mystery, where Allen and his greatest co-star, Diane Keaton, played longtime marrieds sprung from their pleasant rut by the opportunity to play amateur detectives. In both cases, it’s the wife who craves excitement—a whiff of danger becomes an intoxicating perfume—and the stodgy husband who wants to cleave to the couch, and guess who prevails? Just as Woody’s husband in MMM futilely, ineffectually forbade Keaton from spying on their suspected neighbor (“I forbid you! I forbid you to go! Is that what you do when I forbid you?”), Sidney likewise lays down the law as the lord of the manor (“I forbid you, I forbid it, this is forbidden”) to flat-pancake effect.

However, sigh, it’s been a long time since Manhattan Murder Mystery and an even a longer time since Bananas, and the geriatric antics in Crisis in Six Scenes are often cringe-inducing, a rickety charade that confirms all of Allen’s fears about being in over his head and running on fumes. Its frame of reference is dated, the jokes redolent of radio gags retrieved from Bob Hope’s vault (“I had a purple heart,” says a friend, to which Sidney quips, “I had a yellow streak.”), and its visual palette a reversion to the joyless autumnal brown and beige of mid-period Woody. The series’s major comic set piece, inspired by the famous stateroom scene in A Night at the Opera (there’s an explicit mention of the Marx Brothers, just in case we didn’t get the hint), is clumsily staged, like a traffic jam choreographed by Chris Christie, and just when you think things can’t get any balkier, up drives Michael Rapaport in police uniform to milk a scene to death.

But enough. My head hurts and my soul thirsts for club soda. Crisis in Six Scenes has been critically mauled in so many online outlets that rather than conduct a prolonged autopsy, I want to detach three elements from this extended misfire for special examination. Three women, to be precise.

Elaine May. As everyone familiar with 20th-century comedy knows (unless they were raised in the bush), May first made her name and fame with Mike Nichols as the most original and inspired comedy team of the post-atomic bomb, Freudian-age jitters, their sketches and improvs in clubs, TV guest spots, and Broadway a marvel of pinpoint pauses, neurotic quavers drawn as finely as a cat’s whiskers, professional jargon, and preening vanities buffed like status symbols. Unlike the monologues of so many comics from that era, their material has not dated because it was rooted in the prides and insecurities of Jewish humor at its most hyper-stylized, a precursor to Seinfeld and Curb Your Enthusiasm. After May and Nichols went their separate illustrious ways, May wrote, starred in, and directed movies, achieving cult success with A New Leaf, one of the most idiosyncratic oddball comedies ever made, and hitting the iceberg with Ishtar. May’s best scenes in Crisis in Six Scenes return her to her sketch roots as Kay conducts marriage-counseling sessions with dippy aplomb. (Having advised one couple, whose husband had been racking up credit-card bills on hookers and escorts, that he should begin paying his wife for sex . . . only to have him complain that his wife was overcharging him and turning tricks on the side, ”walking up and down Eighth Avenue in shorts.”) Her best scenes, that is, are the ones without Woody. Together, they lack comic rapport and dialectics, a pair of old radios tuned to different stations, broadcasting past each other. Their material is tired and so are they. When Allen and Keaton gave pursuit in Manhattan Murder Mystery, doing a 90s version of The Thin Man’s Nick and Nora, they had enough mobility and agility to make it fun; Allen and May, both in their 80s, can’t execute a similar ground game, to put it politely, and you get exasperated by their futzing and farting around.

Miley Cyrus. Her performance here gives off an interesting gust of energy unrelated to her part, a caricature of a bomb-making lefty. From her first scene, Cyrus’s Lennie is brash, bratty, and bossy, dismissing Sidney as a “moron” and “definitely senile.” Cyrus’s wide-eyed, no-bull, loud-mouth assurance is more than that of a young radical preaching to the oldsters; it comes across as the cocky attitude of a V.M.A. star unintimidated in the company of comedy legends, just wanting to eat her sandwich before retreating to her room or trailer. When so many actors pay obeisance to Woody as if it’s a privilege just to be at the other end of his clapper board, it’s refreshing watching Cyrus exude the prerogatives of a star mapping out her own coordinates and none of this pussyfooting around. Lennie becomes more monotonous as Crisis in Six Scenes creeps along because Allen doesn’t inject any variety or velocity into her monologues but Cyrus herself never loses propulsion, eager to blow this pop stand and get on the road.

Judy Gold. This stand-up comic and producer has only one scene in Crisis and it’s a beaut. Executing a bit of skullduggery to get Lennie out of the country, Sidney is instructed to leave a briefcase full of Cuban pesos in a phone booth after pretending to make a call while Kay acts as a lookout from across the street. After Sid exits, a man is supposed to then enter the phone booth for the pick-up. With his usual fubsiness, Sidney does the drop-off but it isn’t a man who next enters the booth to make a call; it’s a woman played by Judy Gold, all six-foot-three of her. Sidney frantically hurries across the street and tries to reclaim the briefcase, but this lady isn’t having any of it. How do I know it’s yours? He tries to yank it away, but he’s hopelessly outmatched and out-stubborned. In synopsis, it doesn’t read like much, a mere tussle and thwarting complication, but it plays as a classic sidewalk power struggle in capsule form, the only moment in Crisis that conveys the tense friction and squabbling battle-readiness of New York in the “Fun City” Sixties, as if that phone booth were a time machine that had traveled from Bananas to deposit Judy Gold here. In less than a minute, the scene communicates with Sidney Lumet-ish economy that the average New Yorker walking around has more on the ball than an entire choir of suburbanites on the commuter line waiting for barbecue season to begin. And it’s done entirely via Gold’s height, vocal disdain, and askance irritation at this nudnik trying to pull something over on her.

In the fade-out scene (this doesn’t count as a spoiler because there’s nothing to spoil), Sid lies in bed next to Kay after a long, tiring day of aiding and abetting an enemy of the state and ponders his future, wondering if he should “dump this whole idiotic television-series thing” and try writing another novel. Sid is Woody’s simple, barefoot mouthpiece, to borrow a phrase from Roxie Hart, and it’s as if Woody is weedily confessing that this whole thing was a mistake. Maybe it was, but it’s little much voicing your misgivings after you’ve taken the money. Oh, well, he’s gotten a late-life humility lesson (TV’s harder than it looks), which will heal fast because he isn’t one to dwell. Time and mortality may be pressing against the window panes, but Allen keeps thinking and moving ahead, which nobody should begrudge.

Yara Shahidi (Black-ish)

AGE: 16

PROVENANCE: Minneapolis, Minnesota

FAMILY BUSINESS: Shahidi’s father is a cinematographer, and she grew up working with her mother and two younger brothers in print and TV ad campaigns. Like Shahidi, both of her younger brothers co-starred on TV shows this year—Sayeed on ABC’s Uncle Buck and Ehsan on FX’s The People v. O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story.

IMAGINE THAT: Shahidi was about seven when she made her film debut—in the Eddie Murphy comedy Imagine That. “It was just such a fantastic experience. . . . I learned how to ice-skate for it. It was my introduction to the Beatles because the entire soundtrack was Beatles covers.” Since then, she has gone on to co-star in the Angelina Jolie thriller Salt, the political satire Butter, and on ABC’s Scandal, where she played a young Olivia Pope.

FRIENDS IN HIGH PLACES: Michelle Obama has called Black-ish, the socially aware ABC comedy that earned back-to-back Peabody Awards, her favorite TV show. The sitcom’s popularity has stunned Shahidi: “I went to the White House three times within a month.”

OLD SCHOOL: A podcast junkie, Shahidi says, “I used to listen to old radio shows like Johnny Dollar, Dragnet, [and] X Minus One. “I thought that was the most impressive type of acting—to be able to convey where you are, what you’re doing, and how you feel with just your voice.”

HERO’S WELCOME: During a visit to Harvard University, Shahidi met with one of her idols, writer and professor Jamaica Kincaid. “I was telling her that I was reading her book in English class and was such a big fan. She said, ‘Oh, thank you. Weren’t you in that movie Butter?’ I just about passed out.”

Photo: Photograph by Lauren Dukoff.

Shameik Moore (The Get Down)

AGE: 21

PROVENANCE: Atlanta, Georgia

JUMP OFF: After seeing the 2004 dance drama You Got Served, Moore, who grew up in Atlanta, was inspired to enroll at a performing-arts school and start competing in underground dance battles. His introduction to acting was roundabout, after being hired to dance in a Cartoon Network commercial. “I saw myself on TV and I thought, ‘I’m going to start doing this for real.’ Then it just started happening.”

SUNDANCE SENSATION: Moore starred in Dope, the breakout hit of the 2015 Sundance Film Festival, as a Harvard-bound teen living in crime-ridden Inglewood, California. Of the sudden attention he received, Moore says, “I wasn’t really surprised. . . . I was more thankful that I was blessed with the ability to actually start doing something like living my dreams.”

MAKING CONNECTIONS: Moore co-starred in Dope with rapper/record producer A$AP Rocky, whose confidence Moore always admired. After the film’s release, he met Jay Z—“He was talking to me about my music. . . . It was surreal.”—Baz Luhrmann, and other filmmakers eager to collaborate.

MAMA’S BOY: He may be far from his family these days, but he’s never far from his mother’s home-cooking. “My mom cooks me food and sends it overnight through the mail. She has this air-tight Ziploc situation. . . . We’re Jamaican, so she sends me things like oxtail and curry chicken and jerk chicken.”

GETTIN’ DOWN: His role on Luhrmann’s period musical series The Get Down allows him to do everything he loves—dance, act, and immerse himself in hip-hop. “It was a perfect situation . . . [the TV show] has to do with the culture that I have taken on, so I was thankful.”

Photo: Photograph by Lauren Dukoff.

Rowan Blanchard (Girl Meets World)

AGE: 14

PROVENANCE: Los Angeles, California

ONE LOVE: Blanchard has been acting since she was five years old—first booking commercials before moving onto bigger roles in The Back-Up Plan and Spy Kids: All the Time in the World in 4D. “Acting was always the only thing I wanted to do. Even when I wasn’t acting professionally, I would act, star in, and direct plays around the house. Even if they only were seen by five people, I always felt like I needed to do that to express myself.”

YOUNG ONES: Blanchard wasn’t familiar with the Disney series Boy Meets World (the precursor to her spin-off series) until after booking the lead part—and for good reason. “I wasn’t alive when it ended so I didn’t know it at all. Once I booked the show, I went back and watched all of the episodes.”

ROLE MODEL: “After every live taping, we do a meet and greet with the fans in the audience. There was a girl who came up and started crying, and she said, ‘Without your show, I wouldn’t be able to feel confident.’” On the subject of being a role model, Blanchard demurs: “I feel like I just kind of do my thing and I appreciate it when people appreciate that.”

AMBITIONS: “I like to make short films. . . . I usually just grab my friends who don’t act and direct them.” (Her favorite directors at the moment include Sofia Coppola, Wes Anderson, and Deniz Gamze Ergüven.) “That’s what I want to do ultimately: I want to write and direct.”

Photo: Photograph by Lauren Dukoff.

Jeremy Allen White (Shameless)

AGE: 25

PROVENANCE: Brooklyn, New York

STAGE PARENTS: “My parents both moved to New York in their early 20s and they were theater actors. My dad first saw my mom in a play and then he went out at intermission to get her flowers. He brought them to her at the end and said, ‘We have to be together.’”

TINY DANCER: “As a kid I did ballet, tap, and jazz, and I took it really seriously. I really liked it. I went to a new middle school and I joined the dance program there, but it was really shit. Pretty much all my friends were in the drama class, and I was just like, ‘You know what? I’m just going to hang out with my buddies and do that.’”

NETFLIX AND CHILL: Even though he has spent six seasons with Showtime’s ensemble comedy-drama Shameless—in which he plays the Gallagher family brainiac, Lip—he has only recently started watching the series. “I have a hard time watching myself. I’ve only just started because they put it on Netflix. . . . Every once in a while, I’ll get together with some friends and we’ll watch it and make fun of me.”

DON’T LOOK: His parents, meanwhile, loyally watch the program, which has featured numerous sex scenes featuring their son (and the rest of the show’s cast). But ever the supportive elders, his parents don’t seem to mind: “In the pilot episode, I was 18. I had my ass out and I was getting [oral sex], so it was kind of like they knew what we were getting into after the first episode. That was the weirdest it was ever going to be.”

Photo: Photograph by Lauren Dukoff.

Kyle Allen (The Path)

AGE: 21

PROVENANCE: Livermore, California

OFF THE WALL: A rambunctious child, Allen was enrolled in acrobatics classes at an early age. “Your parents notice that there are black footprints that go up to the ceiling and they’re like, ‘We value the walls of our house so you should go do acrobatics.’”

CENTER STAGE: At 12, he was training with 18-year-olds. When those acrobat peers left for college, he enrolled in a dance studio where he took hip-hop and ballet. He was so gifted that a family friend encouraged him to apply to the Kirov Academy of Ballet, in D.C. “The ballet was brutally difficult. . . . I didn’t necessarily like ballet as much as I liked the idea of not living at home.”

DOUBLE TAKE: “I graduated and was like, ‘Oh, right, I never really wanted to be a ballet dancer.’ It took me a while to realize how much I actually accomplished and how what I learned can be applied to anything—the work ethic, the artistry, what things connect with audiences.”

QUICK CHANGE: After graduation he moved to Los Angeles, where he started acting in commercials and other interesting projects like a Master P music video. (“He had a belt buckle that should be in a museum. It was like something Indiana Jones would steal from a temple.”) “Those were the kinds of projects I did, just for the hell of it. It kind of snowballed and I got a commercial agent, then started taking acting classes. It was fun.”

WHEN IT RAINS: The hard work paid off: “I booked The Path and [ABC’s] American Crime on the same day, and picked The Path.”

Photo: Photograph by Lauren Dukoff.

Bryshere Y. Gray (Empire)

AGE: 22

PROVENANCE: Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

UNLIKELY START: Gray—who goes by “Yazz the Greatest” in the rap community—found music before acting. After being sidelined from high-school football because of an injury, Gray performed—freestyles, Notorious B.I.G. samples, etc.— anywhere and everywhere he could, including on the street. “I did it by any means necessary to get somebody to catch recognition of stuff I loved to do.”

THE DISCOVERY: Ultimately he landed a manager and a record deal, but was forced to give up the latter when he booked Empire after a battery of auditions—all in spite of the fact that he had no acting background. “The director didn’t want me to get any training. He felt like what I brought to the show was raw.”

FRESH PRINCE: Will Smith, who is good friends with Gray’s manager and whom Gray considers a mentor, took it upon himself to prepare Gray for his first filming experience. “Before I even went to set, I went to his house and he just broke everything down. . . . He was 21 when he did The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. It’s like deja vu. We’re both from the same neighborhood and stuff like that.”

SPEED BUMP: Transitioning from anonymous street performer to recognizable actor on the world’s most popular entertainment program was “very freaky,” Gray admits. “Going from nobody recognizing you to everybody watching your every move, it can make you a victim of the fame.”

AMBITIONS: He may be new to the acting world, but Gray already has a list of A-list actors with whom he would like to collaborate including Halle Berry, Jennifer Lopez, and Denzel Washington. Given his musical ability, he’d also like to dabble onstage—“I want to do plays and musicals too like Hamilton if I have the time.”

Yara Shahidi (Black-ish)

AGE: 16

PROVENANCE: Minneapolis, Minnesota

FAMILY BUSINESS: Shahidi’s father is a cinematographer, and she grew up working with her mother and two younger brothers in print and TV ad campaigns. Like Shahidi, both of her younger brothers co-starred on TV shows this year—Sayeed on ABC’s Uncle Buck and Ehsan on FX’s The People v. O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story.

IMAGINE THAT: Shahidi was about seven when she made her film debut—in the Eddie Murphy comedy Imagine That. “It was just such a fantastic experience. . . . I learned how to ice-skate for it. It was my introduction to the Beatles because the entire soundtrack was Beatles covers.” Since then, she has gone on to co-star in the Angelina Jolie thriller Salt, the political satire Butter, and on ABC’s Scandal, where she played a young Olivia Pope.

FRIENDS IN HIGH PLACES: Michelle Obama has called Black-ish, the socially aware ABC comedy that earned back-to-back Peabody Awards, her favorite TV show. The sitcom’s popularity has stunned Shahidi: “I went to the White House three times within a month.”

OLD SCHOOL: A podcast junkie, Shahidi says, “I used to listen to old radio shows like Johnny Dollar, Dragnet, [and] X Minus One. “I thought that was the most impressive type of acting—to be able to convey where you are, what you’re doing, and how you feel with just your voice.”

HERO’S WELCOME: During a visit to Harvard University, Shahidi met with one of her idols, writer and professor Jamaica Kincaid. “I was telling her that I was reading her book in English class and was such a big fan. She said, ‘Oh, thank you. Weren’t you in that movie Butter?’ I just about passed out.”

Photograph by Lauren Dukoff.

Shameik Moore (The Get Down)

AGE: 21

PROVENANCE: Atlanta, Georgia

JUMP OFF: After seeing the 2004 dance drama You Got Served, Moore, who grew up in Atlanta, was inspired to enroll at a performing-arts school and start competing in underground dance battles. His introduction to acting was roundabout, after being hired to dance in a Cartoon Network commercial. “I saw myself on TV and I thought, ‘I’m going to start doing this for real.’ Then it just started happening.”

SUNDANCE SENSATION: Moore starred in Dope, the breakout hit of the 2015 Sundance Film Festival, as a Harvard-bound teen living in crime-ridden Inglewood, California. Of the sudden attention he received, Moore says, “I wasn’t really surprised. . . . I was more thankful that I was blessed with the ability to actually start doing something like living my dreams.”

MAKING CONNECTIONS: Moore co-starred in Dope with rapper/record producer A$AP Rocky, whose confidence Moore always admired. After the film’s release, he met Jay Z—“He was talking to me about my music. . . . It was surreal.”—Baz Luhrmann, and other filmmakers eager to collaborate.

MAMA’S BOY: He may be far from his family these days, but he’s never far from his mother’s home-cooking. “My mom cooks me food and sends it overnight through the mail. She has this air-tight Ziploc situation. . . . We’re Jamaican, so she sends me things like oxtail and curry chicken and jerk chicken.”

GETTIN’ DOWN: His role on Luhrmann’s period musical series The Get Down allows him to do everything he loves—dance, act, and immerse himself in hip-hop. “It was a perfect situation . . . [the TV show] has to do with the culture that I have taken on, so I was thankful.”

Photograph by Lauren Dukoff.

Rowan Blanchard (Girl Meets World)

AGE: 14

PROVENANCE: Los Angeles, California

ONE LOVE: Blanchard has been acting since she was five years old—first booking commercials before moving onto bigger roles in The Back-Up Plan and Spy Kids: All the Time in the World in 4D. “Acting was always the only thing I wanted to do. Even when I wasn’t acting professionally, I would act, star in, and direct plays around the house. Even if they only were seen by five people, I always felt like I needed to do that to express myself.”

YOUNG ONES: Blanchard wasn’t familiar with the Disney series Boy Meets World (the precursor to her spin-off series) until after booking the lead part—and for good reason. “I wasn’t alive when it ended so I didn’t know it at all. Once I booked the show, I went back and watched all of the episodes.”

ROLE MODEL: “After every live taping, we do a meet and greet with the fans in the audience. There was a girl who came up and started crying, and she said, ‘Without your show, I wouldn’t be able to feel confident.’” On the subject of being a role model, Blanchard demurs: “I feel like I just kind of do my thing and I appreciate it when people appreciate that.”

AMBITIONS: “I like to make short films. . . . I usually just grab my friends who don’t act and direct them.” (Her favorite directors at the moment include Sofia Coppola, Wes Anderson, and Deniz Gamze Ergüven.) “That’s what I want to do ultimately: I want to write and direct.”

Photograph by Lauren Dukoff.

Jeremy Allen White (Shameless)

AGE: 25

PROVENANCE: Brooklyn, New York

STAGE PARENTS: “My parents both moved to New York in their early 20s and they were theater actors. My dad first saw my mom in a play and then he went out at intermission to get her flowers. He brought them to her at the end and said, ‘We have to be together.’”

TINY DANCER: “As a kid I did ballet, tap, and jazz, and I took it really seriously. I really liked it. I went to a new middle school and I joined the dance program there, but it was really shit. Pretty much all my friends were in the drama class, and I was just like, ‘You know what? I’m just going to hang out with my buddies and do that.’”

NETFLIX AND CHILL: Even though he has spent six seasons with Showtime’s ensemble comedy-drama Shameless—in which he plays the Gallagher family brainiac, Lip—he has only recently started watching the series. “I have a hard time watching myself. I’ve only just started because they put it on Netflix. . . . Every once in a while, I’ll get together with some friends and we’ll watch it and make fun of me.”

DON’T LOOK: His parents, meanwhile, loyally watch the program, which has featured numerous sex scenes featuring their son (and the rest of the show’s cast). But ever the supportive elders, his parents don’t seem to mind: “In the pilot episode, I was 18. I had my ass out and I was getting [oral sex], so it was kind of like they knew what we were getting into after the first episode. That was the weirdest it was ever going to be.”

Photograph by Lauren Dukoff.

Alycia Debnam Carey (Fear the Walking Dead)

AGE: 23

PROVENANCE: Sydney, Australia

EARLY START: Carey was introduced to acting by her mother, a children’s television writer in Australia. “If she needed a kid to do a little extra piece here and there I would do it. It became a fun thing to do. Then, when I was eight, I realized I loved it.”

UP IN THE AIR: Around the age of 17, Carey started thinking about moving to Hollywood, clear on the other side of the world. Without any job leads, she and her mother temporarily relocated to L.A. for six weeks, during which Carey landed a job—then a visa. “I had the most tunnel vision I’ve ever had for something ever in that period of time.”

LET GO: “The moment I stopped caring about planning my career so much, what the next move would be, I started getting better jobs.” Even in her career lulls, she never second-guessed herself enough to think of an alternative career. “There’s no back-up plan. That’s my only plan.”

IN THE BLOOD: “I used to be really squeamish, but I remember watching the first episode of The Walking Dead and being like, ‘Whoa, this is gore heavy.’ Now, every day on set, there’s something bizarre happening—like you’re in the middle of the beach, covered in fake blood and dirt, with a prop in your hand. Or you’re on a sand dune waiting for a herd of zombie . . . hundreds of them. It takes a while for them to get to you, so it’s sort of a weird moment of just standing there in blood and guts with a fake weapon, thinking, ‘What am I doing? What is this?’”

Photograph by Lauren Dukoff.

Tyler Posey (Teen Wolf)

AGE: 24

PROVENANCE: Santa Monica, California

LIKE FATHER: One of Posey’s earliest memories is being on the set of HBO’s From Earth to the Moon mini-series, in which his father, John Posey, co-starred, when he was four. “I remember being on set with Ron Howard and Tom Hanks [who produced the mini-series]. At one point, it was really late at night, I fell asleep, and when I woke up there was a pillow under me and I was wrapped in a tablecloth. I loved it, I thought [everything about being on set] was so cool.”

BIG BREAK: After making his acting debut at six, Posey was cast as Jennifer Lopez’s son in Maid in Manhattan. “It’s such a cute movie. . . . It was my first big, big project, and I learned so much from Jennifer and Ralph [Fiennes].”

TEEN WOLF: On landing the show’s starring role, Posey says, “I was excited about being on MTV at 18 years old—that was still one of my favorite channels to watch, and it was the lead. At that point in my life I had never really played the lead of anything.”

FULL CIRCLE: Posey has acted alongside his father multiple times, even appearing in a film written by him—2010’s *Legendary *starring John Cena and Patricia Clarkson. Next, Posey will make his directorial debut during the upcoming season of Teen Wolf. And he hopes his father, who has a recurring role on the series, will be available for the episode. (“That would just be incredible.”) If all goes as planned, Posey hopes to spend more time behind the camera. “Acting has always been a passion of mine, but I think my biggest passion lies within filmmaking.”

Photograph by Lauren Dukoff.

Isaac Hempstead-Wright (Game of Thrones)

AGE: 17

PROVENANCE: Kent, England

WINTER IS COMING: The teenager coincidentally found acting while trying to avoid the show’s signature season. “I used to go to a football club on weekends, but it was just too cold and I hated it, so I looked for something else to do. My mom said, ‘Oh there’s a drama group that looks fun.’”

BEGINNER’S LUCK: About six months in, Hempstead-Wright, then 10, was coaxed into a local casting for Game of Thrones—then just a “tiny pilot no one had heard of”—by his drama coach. “I happened to get the part [as Bran Stark] and it’s been uphill from there.”

RAW DEAL: The actor says he made “a rubbish” agreement with his parents about his paychecks. The deal: he could spend earnings from his first job if he promised to stock away future acting paychecks in savings. “I was cast in an advert a couple of days before [getting] Game of Thrones—some tiny Channel 4 thing back in the U.K.—so I only got to spend that small amount of money.”

KING’S LANDING: Before beginning work on the show’s sixth season, Hempstead-Wright befriended Dean-Charles Chapman—who played Tommen Baratheon, the Seven Kingdoms ruler who jumped to his death in the drama’s recent finale. “I remember him saying before we even started filming, ‘I bet I’m going to die this season.’ I’m like, ‘No, don’t you dare die.’”

SPOILER ALERT: “He called me up and said, ‘You won’t believe it.’” Wright, meanwhile, jokes that he’s tried to stave off a similar fate by bribing producers with champagne and flowers.

RENAISSANCE MAN: In downtime, Hempstead-Wright plays the piano and guitar. “Music is one of my biggest passions aside from acting.”

Photograph by Lauren Dukoff.

Emily Robinson (Transparent)

AGE: 17

PROVENANCE: New York, New York

BROADWAY BABY: Growing up on the Upper West Side, Robinson—who has been working as a model and actress since she was six—frequented Broadway shows with her parents. One of those early shows, Other Desert Cities, starred her future Transparent co-star Judith Light. (“It’s definitely impacted what I’ve been drawn to.”) Robinson returned to the theater recently—although this time in L.A.—starring alongside Jennifer Westfeldt in *Big Sky * at the Geffen Playhouse.

THE MENTOR:Transparent is a landmark TV series, and the privilege of working with its creator, Jill Soloway, is not lost on Robinson. “She’s such a feminist filmmaker icon. . . . Just seeing her work and her talk about [important issues like the transgender movement] made me want to make something that says something that I think hasn’t been seen.”

QUICK STUDY: Robinson has delivered—she’s already written, directed, and starred in her first short film, Virgin Territory, “about a teenage girl’s sexual awakening and experimentation”—which premiered at the Los Angeles Film Festival this year. “Making it was the the happiest I’ve ever been because it was everything I love to do all meshed into one thing.”

MIX IT UP: Next up, Robinson explores different genres on the big screen, with Behold My Heart, a drama starring Marisa Tomei, the thriller Broken Vows starring Wes Bentley, and Once Upon a Time in Venice, a comedy starring Bruce Willis. “He was so sweet. He treated me like one of his daughters.”

IVY LEAGUES: Although she was accepted by her dream school, Harvard, she ultimately decided to stay close to home and enroll at Columbia, where she will study creative writing after a deferment. “As an actor sometimes you want to create things. It’s not an empowered position to have to act in someone else’s work, especially when the roles aren’t exactly something you’re excited about.”

Photograph by Lauren Dukoff.

Katherine McNamara (Shadowhunters)

AGE: 20

PROVENANCE: Kansas City, Missouri

SMART COOKIE: McNamara, who earned a bachelor’s degree from Drexel University at 17, is busy working on her master’s from John Hopkins University. “I’m a huge nerd and I love school. . . . I think that’s partly why I ended up in this industry, because you’re always learning.”

GRAND ENTRANCE: McNamara’s first brush with Broadway was appearing on it—when she was cast, at 14, in A Little Night Music alongside Angela Lansbury and Catherine Zeta-Jones. “I never had a full rehearsal with lights and orchestra until my first show. I will never forget the moment I stepped onstage. . . . It hit me for a minute, what was actually happening. I froze and I thought, ‘All right. Here we go.’”

ROLE MODELS: Lansbury and Zeta-Jones were eventually replaced by other equally inspiring performers—Bernadette Peters and Elaine Stritch. “Those four women taught me so much about what it’s like to be a woman, what it’s like to be a leading lady, and how to have a career that has such longevity.”

SHADOWHUNTERS: She learned that she had won the starring role in the Freeform series, based on Cassandra Clare’s wildly popular young-adult novels, only 10 minutes before the casting was announced to fans. “I was still trying to process the news, let alone [be ready to] deal with millions of people who are going to process it with me. Thankfully, I got a very warm welcome.”

ONE DAY: The filmmaker she’s “dying to work with” is David O. Russell, with whom she shared a long conversation after a screening of his 2012 drama Silver Linings Playbook. “He’s one of my favorite directors. I’m not even sure he knows my name at this point, because he started calling me Isla Fisher. But I’ll take it.”

Photograph by Lauren Dukoff.

Adria Arjona (Emerald City)

AGE: 24

PROVENANCE: San Juan, Puerto Rico

GENETIC JACKPOT: Arjona says her mother, former Miss Puerto Rico Leslie Torres, used her beauty-contestant winnings to help Arjona’s father—Ricardo Arjona, the Grammy-winning Guatemalan singer-songwriter—release his first CD.

EARLY YEARS: “I grew up with musicians and artists around me, in a bubble where the arts were kind of all we knew. When I moved to Miami [at 13], I felt like I didn’t fit in. I got into this little theater program and I just fell in love with it.”

TRUE DETECTIVE: “I watched the first season and I was completely obsessed with it,” Arjona says of the HBO series in which she had a Season 2 role, as Taylor Kitsch’s girlfriend. “I remember telling my manager, ‘I don’t know how, but I will be on that show.’ My manager kind of looked at me like, ‘You’re crazy,’ but I was cast.”

LEAP OF FAITH: Being cast as Dorothy Gale, the iconic American character played by Judy Garland in 1939, has been Arjona’s biggest career surprise yet. “I’m Hispanic, so even when I got called into audition, I looked at my manager and was like, ‘It’s not going to happen.’ But I just thought, I’m going to prepare the best that I can. I got [to the audition] and it was all American girls. I was like, ‘I’m just going to walk in and conquer it.’”

GIRL INTERRUPTED: Arjona got the call that she was cast while eating dinner in Colombia, where she was filming another project. “I just remember digging into a chocolate soufflé and crying in the middle of a restaurant. . . . It was kind of perfect because two of my favorite things are working and chocolate.”

Photograph by Lauren Dukoff.

Kyle Allen (The Path)

AGE: 21

PROVENANCE: Livermore, California

OFF THE WALL: A rambunctious child, Allen was enrolled in acrobatics classes at an early age. “Your parents notice that there are black footprints that go up to the ceiling and they’re like, ‘We value the walls of our house so you should go do acrobatics.’”

CENTER STAGE: At 12, he was training with 18-year-olds. When those acrobat peers left for college, he enrolled in a dance studio where he took hip-hop and ballet. He was so gifted that a family friend encouraged him to apply to the Kirov Academy of Ballet, in D.C. “The ballet was brutally difficult. . . . I didn’t necessarily like ballet as much as I liked the idea of not living at home.”

DOUBLE TAKE: “I graduated and was like, ‘Oh, right, I never really wanted to be a ballet dancer.’ It took me a while to realize how much I actually accomplished and how what I learned can be applied to anything—the work ethic, the artistry, what things connect with audiences.”

QUICK CHANGE: After graduation he moved to Los Angeles, where he started acting in commercials and other interesting projects like a Master P music video. (“He had a belt buckle that should be in a museum. It was like something Indiana Jones would steal from a temple.”) “Those were the kinds of projects I did, just for the hell of it. It kind of snowballed and I got a commercial agent, then started taking acting classes. It was fun.”

WHEN IT RAINS: The hard work paid off: “I booked The Path and [ABC’s] American Crime on the same day, and picked The Path.”

Photograph by Lauren Dukoff.

Bryshere Y. Gray (Empire)

AGE: 22

PROVENANCE: Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

UNLIKELY START: Gray—who goes by “Yazz the Greatest” in the rap community—found music before acting. After being sidelined from high-school football because of an injury, Gray performed—freestyles, Notorious B.I.G. samples, etc.— anywhere and everywhere he could, including on the street. “I did it by any means necessary to get somebody to catch recognition of stuff I loved to do.”

THE DISCOVERY: Ultimately he landed a manager and a record deal, but was forced to give up the latter when he booked Empire after a battery of auditions—all in spite of the fact that he had no acting background. “The director didn’t want me to get any training. He felt like what I brought to the show was raw.”

FRESH PRINCE: Will Smith, who is good friends with Gray’s manager and whom Gray considers a mentor, took it upon himself to prepare Gray for his first filming experience. “Before I even went to set, I went to his house and he just broke everything down. . . . He was 21 when he did The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. It’s like deja vu. We’re both from the same neighborhood and stuff like that.”

SPEED BUMP: Transitioning from anonymous street performer to recognizable actor on the world’s most popular entertainment program was “very freaky,” Gray admits. “Going from nobody recognizing you to everybody watching your every move, it can make you a victim of the fame.”

AMBITIONS: He may be new to the acting world, but Gray already has a list of A-list actors with whom he would like to collaborate including Halle Berry, Jennifer Lopez, and Denzel Washington. Given his musical ability, he’d also like to dabble onstage—“I want to do plays and musicals too like Hamilton if I have the time.”